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6. Money Trees, Development Dreams and Colonial Legacies In 6 Money Trees, Development Dreams and Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Pasifika Horticultural Labour Victoria Stead Rosemary and I are sitting at a round plastic table, out the front of the small cabin she shares with four other Ni-Vanuatu women in a caravan park in north-central Victoria. It is about six o’clock in the evening and they, and another 14 Ni-Vanuatu living in the surrounding cabins, have not long gotten back from their shifts sorting and packing boxes of apples and pears at a local packing shed. As we sit drinking mugs of tea, some of the older women inside the cabin are preparing dinner in a small, portable convection oven perched on a bench in the cramped kitchen space. Outside, others are making their way to or from the shower block at the other end of the caravan park, carrying with them the work clothes that they wash daily in the showers to save the two dollars required to use the park’s washing machines. Rows of work clothes, imprinted with the logo of the packing shed where the group work, hang from clothes lines strung up between the caravans. The group arrived four months ago as part of the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) that brings Pacific Islander workers to labour in the Australian horticultural industry on a seasonal basis; they will be here for another two months before they return to Vanuatu. This is Rosemary’s third trip, and she will return again in subsequent years if she is able. Her experience at the packing shed has been positive by many measures; however, other Ni-Vanuatu workers have 133 LABOUR LINES AND COLONIAL POWER had negative experiences and, in any case, even those aspects she finds positive are never quite straightforwardly so. We drink our tea slowly and our conversation turns to the experiences of another group of Ni-Vanuatu workers, mostly male, who are also resident at the same caravan park and working picking tomatoes on a nearby farm. It has been a poor season for tomatoes and, with the men paid on a piece rate basis, the poor size and quality of the crop makes for tough work and very low pay. Rosemary is narrating a conversation she had with another Pacific Islander, not a temporary labour migrant but a resident in the area. In discussing the workers’ conditions, particularly on the tomato farm, the man had said to her, ‘you know what, this is what we call modern-day slavery’. I mention the allusion to the nineteenth-century blackbirding of Melanesians, many of them Ni-Vanuatu, to the sugar cane plantations of Queensland and northern New South Wales. Rosemary pauses, sips her tea, and replies: ‘Yes, that was us’. Pacific Islanders have long formed a significant component of the workforce within Australian horticulture (fruit and vegetable production). The labours of contemporary Pacific Islanders who travel to rural Australia as temporary workers, as well as the labours of settled Pacific Islanders who form a significant part of the workforce in many rural areas, take place within complex ecologies and histories of colonial encounter. Most notably, the contemporary horticultural labour of Pacific Islanders takes place against the historical backdrop of the nineteenth- century Pacific labour trade, which saw thousands of Pacific Islanders ‘blackbirded’—transported through coercion, kidnapping or trickery— from their Melanesian homes, or else recruited in legal but nevertheless exploitative conditions, to labour on the cane fields of north-eastern Australia.1 This is a period of Australian and Pacific history that has been written about powerfully by Tracey Banivanua Mar and others.2 It is invoked by contemporary Australian South Sea Islander activists, who are the descendants of those blackbirded workers and who are campaigning for recognition of the Pacific labour trade and the harms done to their ancestors. It is also a history that is sometimes invoked by contemporary Pacific Islanders in response to their own labour experiences, or those of their kin or community. These references to the blackbirding past 1 Connell, ‘From Blackbirds to Guestworkers’. 2 Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue; Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific. See also, Munro, ‘The Pacific Islands Labour Trade’; Saunders, ‘Masters and Servants’; Graves, Cane and Labour. 134 6 . MONEY TREES, DEVELOPMENT DREAMS AND COLONIAL LEGACIES are often made to draw parallels between historical and contemporary labour experiences, and often invoke the language of ‘slavery’ in doing so. This language appears in descriptions of Pacific Islander workers— past and present—as ‘slaves’, as well as through references to the ‘slave- like’ conditions of some contemporary Pacific Islander labour, and in descriptions of contemporary Pacific Islander labour migrations, as in the vignette above, as ‘modern-day slavery’. These references, and invocations of the past, have also found expression in a stream of news reports about exploitation in the scheme and the industry more widely, including reports commenting on concerns raised within the context of the Australian Government’s parliamentary inquiry into modern slavery, and local arenas such as the 2017 community forum on modern slavery held at Mildura in northern Victoria.3 At the same time, though, some contemporary Pacific Islander workersalso describe the fruit trees they labour on as ‘money trees’, and large numbers of Pacific Islanders, like Rosemary, desire and actively seek out opportunities for horticultural work in rural Australia, including through the SWP, which is actively promoted (and often pursued) as a path to ‘development’.4 ‘Money trees’, development dreams and colonial legacies thus converge, and sometimes collide, in the orchards, caravan parks, churches and community spaces of rural Australia. In this chapter, I explore the complex, charged discourses and affects that accompany these convergences, focusing particularly on the experiences of Pacific Islanders who prune, thin and harvest the fruit trees of the Greater Shepparton Region in north-central Victoria. Placing contemporary Pasifika labour in conversation with its historical antecedents, I map out some of the key contours of debates among historians about the nature of the nineteenth-century labour trade, and the proper relationship between recognising Pacific Islander agency and the coercive force of the state and labour recruiters. I also engage with more contemporary discussions about ‘modern-day slavery’, race and 3 For example, Emma Field, ‘Seasonal Worker Program Exploitation Claims Raised at Mildura Forum’, Weekly Times, 31 October 2017, www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/news/national/seasonal- worker-program-exploitation-claims-raised-at-mildura-forum/news-story/6e49e03051905d7204f bb35753e0bd64; Locke, Buchanan and Graue, ‘Seasonal Worker Program’; Ben Doherty, ‘Hungry, Poor, Exploited: Alarm over Australia’s Import of Farm Workers’, The Guardian, 3 August 2017, www. theguardian.com/ global-development/2017/aug/03/hungry-poor-exploited-alarm-over-australias- import-of-farm-workers; Nick McKenzie, ‘Slavery Claims as Seasonal Workers from Vanuatu Paid Nothing for Months’ Work’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 March 2017, www.smh.com.au/national/ slavery-claims-as-seasonal-workers-from-vanuatu-paid-nothing-for-months-work-20170327-gv7k99. html. On the Australian Government’s parliamentary inquiry, see Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs,Hidden in Plain Sight, particularly Chapter 9. 4 Doyle and Sharma, ‘Maximizing the Development Impacts from Temporary Migration’. 135 LABOUR LINES AND COLONIAL POWER migration. However, in doing so, I am not so much interested in wading into debates about whether or not Pacific horticultural labour is or was ‘slavery’ as I am in charting some of the different ways in which slavery has been imagined and discursively mobilised. For all the scholarly merit of debates around whether the Pacific labour trade constituted slavery,5 the danger in these debates is that they slip into a particular mode of legalistic technicality, and of contestation around terminology and definitional criteria, that can miss the lived substance and experience of what people are talking about when they invoke the language of slavery. Likewise, with debates over the definitional scope and parameters of ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern slavery’.6 What I seek to do in the following pages, then, is to interrogate discourses both of ‘slavery’ and of ‘development’ as two intersecting strands of narrative and meaning-making that circulate in relation to Pacific Islander horticultural labour, and through which contemporary Pacific Islanders locate themselves in relation to contested colonial pasts. These discourses articulate with one another in the messy terrain of everyday encounter and affect and, in doing so, tell us something about the kinds of precarity experienced by Pacific Islander horticultural workers, the continuities and colonial legacies that inform contemporary Pacific Islander lives, and the interplays of structural forces and Pasifika agency. Blackbirds, Slaves and Willing Workers From 1863 until Federation in 1901, some 60,000 men, women and children were transported to the cane fields in north-eastern Australia from what are now the countries of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Kanaky/New Caledonia. Debates about how best to characterise and understand the migrations of these Pacific Islanders have occupied historians over the last 60 or so years, hinging particularly on the question of the relationship between coercion and agency. There
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